


Fourteen Minutes

by Reinette_de_la_Saintonge



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Creepy, Gen, Hitchhiking, Simcoe being Simcoe, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-29
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-08 05:14:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12857517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reinette_de_la_Saintonge/pseuds/Reinette_de_la_Saintonge
Summary: A young woman on her way home from a friend's place picks up a somewhat unsettling hitchhiker.





	Fourteen Minutes

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know what to say except that I hope each and every one of you always travels safe wherever you go.

October 26th

 

**17:52**

The car was silent except for the radio blaring the millionth return of a pop song that had been popular sometime in the summer of last year.

It was cold outside and dark, the ground littered with fallen foilage, but the car was heated up nice and cosy. The road before and behind her was dark and empty, and she enjoyed that, being alone in the car, away from all people, her family, academia, friends.

She’d spent the entire last weekend with friends in the countryside (seriously, how many people in their mid-20s _had_ parents, except for Dan apparently, who owned a picturesque cottage in the Devon countryside and let their kids use it to invite friends?). Apart from the new environment, everything else had been the same as always. The usual bickering, the couples calling it an early night to disappear upstairs together. They could’ve had that anywhere else, too. But the scenery was nicer of course than the London skyscrapers or the industrial non-charms of Birmingham or wherever they all had moved after school, scattered to the four winds like the ashes of their teenage friendship they had tried to reassemble. And to some extent, it had been nice, she was sure she would get back to Louise some time, that was what WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype had been invented for-

Where the heck even was she? At night, everything looked the same, the fields, the small woodland areas in between- she was glad to have packed the sat nav.

Aha, there was a fork ahead, she had to turn left there, an arrow and the pink highlighting of the road on the display informed her.

Suddenly, a figure in the headlights. At first she had thought it was an animal, but it wasn’t, no, this was definitively a human. Almost colourless eyes widened with surprise and shock looked at her, piercing her very soul. She slammed her foot on the break and turned her face away, preparing herself for the impact. Oh God, she hadn’t seen a soul in miles, and now, in the precise moment when she had not paid attention, distracted by the sat nav-

No impact. The car came to a halt mere inches in front of the man, who stumbled backwards.

 

**17:53**

Breathe in, and out. In, and out.  Shaking, she loosened her grip from the steering wheel and opened the door. Her seatbelt snapped back with a low click. Positively wobbly-kneed, she managed to get out of the car.

“I am so, so sorry, I didn’t see you! You see, I thought I was lost and I was looking at the sat nav, and then suddenly-“

“’s all right.” The man flashed her a curt smile and nonchalantly leant against the bonnet of her scrappy old Golf.

“It’s easy to get lost around here if you aren’t a local.”

“Are you sure you are ok?”, she asked once again.

“I am. No harm done.”

She sighed with relief, her hand grabbing the doorframe for support so tightly her knuckles showed as a white mountain ridge through the skin of her hand.

“As it happens”, the stranger went on conversationally, “you could do me a favour.”

“Me… You?” she asked dumbly. What could he want? Her money, her phone? Ha ha, nice one. She’d probably just join him searching her car for valuables if that was what he was after. If of course he meant favours of a certain kind, she’d kick him in the balls before he could even get close enough to her and in that case, she would deliberately run him over.

Seemingly oblivious to the many wrong and indecent ways in which his precise wording could be misinterpreted, he continued:

“Could you please take me with you up the road a bit? I’ll tell you where you can let me out. It’s not far, just some fifteen miles from here on the way to Honiton or the A30, if that’s your direction?”

Yes, she was headed that way, back on her way home to Leicester.

She nodded and the stranger folded himself onto the passenger seat. It was then, in the dim light inside the car, that she first noticed how tall he was.

Tall, pretty athletic build, dressed in a dark green sports jacket which he had tried to tone down somewhat by wearing a white shirt underneath that revealed a cluster of errant chest hair escaping from the collar.

He looked like someone who had attempted to dress “cool”, fashionable, and failed. Not that it didn’t look good, it certainly was something, a look, but he had one of those faces that didn’t sell a modern chic well. Something about his features made him look like one of those actors who only ever get casted for period drama, maybe it was his stare, these cold blue eyes that looked as if they could deep-freeze (or straight up kill) a person when in a bad mood.

She couldn’t tell his hair colour, it could have been anything between brown and ginger and was tied in a messy ponytail, as best as he had managed, so it seemed, at the back of his head. Definitively an eccentric. Maybe an artist? A musician? A writer?

 

**17:58**

“So you live at the farm where I picked you up?”

It was awkward, sitting in a car with a complete stranger without trying to make conversation. Besides, talking kept her away from her thoughts.

A hitchhiker. Seriously? Everybody knew how these stories turned out, why had she done it in the first place? She was alone in her car in a rural area she didn’t know. What had she been thinking?

The hairs on her arms raised with a slight chill.

“No. I was on a walk, and just about to turn around and go back home.”

He studied her face with a one-sided assumed familiarity that crept under her skin. How could any person not blink for such a long time?

He chuckled, a sound almost as unsettling as one of these baby dolls that could make allegedly “real” baby noises, fake and way too cheerful.

“You are thinking about all the hitchhiking horror-stories you have ever heard of, I can tell”, he pointed out to her, still looking at her with that amused, waxen grin on his face while she made a point of never letting her eyes stray from the road, not even to take a look at the sat nav.

“What, do you think I’m going to vanish into thin air around the next corner? Or worse-“

He broke off there.

“I am not a monster”, he said with a disdainful frown as if it was lèse-majesté to even assume he could be capable of the things a stranger could do to a young woman traveling alone in her car in the darkness in a strange place.

“I just want to go home”, he closed, looking away from her for the first time, directing his gaze to fade into the passing blackness outside. Something about his voice was odd, and it was not the unexpectedly high pitch that didn’t quite fit the man’s physical appearance.

 

**18:01**

The silence in the car hung heavy like a storm cloud. The man with the unsettling pale eyes that seemed to glow in the sparse light the car’s headlights threw onto the road in front of them was silent, the index finger of his right hand tapping an irregular rhythm against the dashboard.

“Could you please stop this?”

She could hear her voice sound more brittle and higher than usual. The twitch in his finger, the voice, his whole physical appearance- she prayed to God he wouldn’t turn out to be a serial killer because horror-movie wise, he already ticked all the boxes of someone who would murder a person in their own car and later bury them in a ditch.

“You’re asking yourself if you’ve made a big mistake letting me into the car.”

Apparently, he had noticed she had accelerated a little, disregarding the speed limit in order to get rid of him rather sooner than later.

Instead of affirming his suspicions, she nervously looked at him from the side only to find he had come somewhat closer to her and was studying her face as if she were an unidentified species of chameleon and he the scientist who discovered it.

“We all make decisions in our lives we come regret. I certainly did”- she couldn’t decide if his voice sounded airily or darkly. An itchy numbness in her guts and knees took hold of her and she hoped the stranger would tell her to drop him off soon.

She didn’t want to imagine what exactly he regretted, or even worse, what he didn’t regret.  


**18:03**

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, where exactly should I drop you off?”

“Does it matter, given you told me you do not know the area? Whatever I tell you now will not mean anything to you anyway. You’re driving me home.”

His voice sounded definitive, self-assured, almost as if it were her obligation to do it, as if he believed he had some sort of authority over a complete stranger who was already doing him a favour by taking him in.

_You’re driving me home._

Dread took hold of her. Now that sounded like something a serial killer would say. She shouldn’t have watched so many horror movies. Why had she ever enjoyed them? Unwittingly, she started to analyse where on his body he could hide any weapons, if the inside pockets of a sports jacket were big enough for a firearm or a knife- some piano wire or a very thin rope would probably fit in.

 

 

**18:04**

“Turn left”, her passenger said at the last second, forcing her to slam on the break a second time in order to be able to make the turn.

Her sat nav told her to keep on the road, not to turn left.

But what could she do? She had to be smart now, use all her wit and cunning. Perhaps it would be best to pretend to oblige the man and see where this –and ironically, the car she was supposedly in charge of- was going.

 

**18:06**

“Stop.”

She halted the car.

“I am home.”

Through the trees, she could faintly make out the outline of a house, all its windows dark.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and gave her another of his unsettling smiles.

“Thanks for the ride. Travel safe.”

And with that, he was gone, following the pathway to the house. Her eyes followed the man for a second before her eyes returned to the small screen showing her a map of the area, a little dot indicating where she was located. She made sure to take all the details in, the name of the road, the intersection she had passed, before she looked over to the house once more. Limers Lane. One could never know when she would need to know this.

The man was gone, and the windows were still dark.

Shivering, she started the engine and drove off, disregarding the speed limit again and not even caring about the possibility of receiving a speeding ticket should she get caught.

When she reached the A30 at Honiton, suddenly the weight of her disturbing acquaintance fell off her shoulders. The man was far behind her and she was making good pace and would bring miles and miles between herself and him. She switched the radio on and the sound of some drive time-show radio personality cracking shallow jokes in between songs she normally didn’t like soothed her.

All was well.

 

Three and a half hours later, she was home without even stopping once on her way. Tired, she crept into bed and opened her laptop to watch an episode of _All Creatures Great and Small_.

What better than some innocent 80’s TV series set in the 1930s about three Yorkshire vets trying to be helpful and rescue pets and their humans alike to get her mind off the scary stranger?

 

 

The next morning, October 27th.

 

The phone rang. She woke up when the caller remained insistent after the fifth ring.

The display showed a picture of her and the caller standing in the kitchen at her parent’s house, covered in cream and sprinkles, the older of the two women proudly holding a cake into the camera.

It was her mother.

“Mum?” Her voice was heavy with with the disapproval of sleepy annoyance.

“Elsie Hewlett”, (oh how she hated being called Elsie) “where are you?”

“I’m home, mum. What’s wrong?”

“You should have called me and your father once you got home! What were you thinking, Jesus, you gave us a fright-“ Her mother was only halted in her tirade of motherly concern mixed with fury by her persistent lung-issue she refused to see a specialist about.

“Mum, what’s happened? I’m home, I’m fine.”

“Didn’t you know? There was a terrible car accident somewhere in Devon. Two cars, five people, frontal crash, everyone dead. Dan called, Dan from school, he said he heard it in the local news just now and they said one of the cars involved was exactly your model and then he told me you didn’t respond to his texts-“

The older woman sobbed, still frightened, but relieved.

“Hush, I’m all right. I just went straight to bed, when I came home, that’s all”, she tried to soothe her mother.

When her mother was sufficiently assured she was fine, breathing and alive, she hung up and typed “Devon car accident” into her phone and pressed search.

The first result was a short article from a local newspaper.

 

_After a horrific car crash in which five lost their life, Combe View will remain closed for traffic for the day. Motorists are advised to avert the road closure by driving through Limers Lane._

_The accident occurred between 6:00 p.m. and 6:10 p.m. when a local farmer, who had heard the sound of the impact on his estate came to investigate the sound of the noise-_

 

Limers Lane. That was where the house was. She opened Google Maps. Combe View and Limers Lane formed a triangle, the two roads meeting at the tip. From the direction she had come, both roads would have let her to her destination. She would have taken the other road, had the stranger not insisted on being dropped off in Limers Lane.

Realising what this meant, she collapsed on her bed. She wanted to thank the man now, suddenly, in her mind, the creepy maybe-homicidal-maniac seemed like an act of divine intervention, even if it was just a coincidence, a very, very lucky one.

And she hadn’t even asked his name. How should she thank him now?

Remembering where she had dropped him off and taking the information her subsequent web search provided her with, she deduced the house where she had dropped the stranger off was a place called Wolford Lodge.

-Only Wolford Lodge turned out to be a rentable holiday home with a historic chapel belonging to the original structure that had stood on the same spot as the current house until some point in the last century.

And, as the webpage informed her, was presently vacant.

After another half an hour of browsing the internet and falling down a rabbit hole of clicking through a chain of Wikipedia-articles that got her from the chapel at Wolford to the previous owner of the original Wolford Lodge to the American War of Independence to George Washington to some obscure group of early American spies called the “Culper Ring” (very interesting!), she slammed the laptop shut.

 _Travel safe_ , the sound of the man’s curiously high voice resounded in her head.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So, the roads I mention in the story all exist. I've never (not yet) visited the area, my knowledge relies on Google Maps and the rest of the internet. 
> 
> Elsie is a descendant of THE Hewletts (and in my universe, they're always going to be Anna and Edmund.). 
> 
> Stories of ghost hitchhikers are plenty about everywhere, with a few more spectacular hitchhiker-hauntings standing out. 
> 
> As always, your comments and critique are greatly appreciated, let me know what you think of my first clumsy venture into the ghost-story genre!
> 
> I thought I should add that John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806) died on 26th October 1806 in Exeter. He fell severely ill on his way to assuming his new post as Commander-in-Chief of India and was shipped back from Portugal to England. Nobody expected he would survive being severely ill this time. His wife and children were informed and they made the trip to Exeter to say their farewells. He died in Exeter and didn't make it home that day.


End file.
